Last we left off the Treasury of the British Empire was flowing into China.
And the Honorable East India Company was still reeling under the staggering debt
it owed the government for underwriting its military conquests in India.
Something needed to be done.
They needed to find some tradeable good, something other than silver that the
Chinese wanted to import to offset the massive costs of the Victorian need for tea.
And the answer they found
was opium.
By the early eighteen hundreds tea sales in England were unimaginably high
given the quantity they were importing the average English household spent
about five percent of its income just on tea.
The government itself was
basically propped up by the tea trade,
because the government had lent the
Honorable east india company so much money to conquer parts of India and
because a huge portion of the east india company's revenue came from transporting
tea from China
the country was even more dependent on the tea trade as that revenue was being
used not only to repay the debt the company had incurred but to pay interest
on it.
But even as the Tea craze was consuming England
the Honorable East India Company
was also coming to the realization that their conquests in India weren't
realizing the returns they'd hoped.
Their plans to grow cotton in india had gone
awry as cotton production in the Americas and especially in Egypt were on
the rise.
But it turns out that something else grew really well on all that land that
they planned to use for cotton,
poppies.
So the east india company found its solution.
They would grow poppies in
India convert them into opium sell that at a profit in China, use the profits to
buy tea and then sell that at a profit back in Britain.
There were only a few problems with this plan
besides the fact that it meant
pushing drugs on an unheard-of scale,
there was also the issue that opium was technically illegal in China and the
Honorable east india company being of course the Honorable east india company
would never do something illegal.
Ok they would but they didn't want to risk getting kicked out of China or cut
off from its tea. So they set up a market in Calcutta, basically the part of India
closest to China that they controlled
and they said anybody who wants to buy
opium we're selling it right here
no idea what you might want to do with it but hey that's not our business who
wants some opium come on.
And then they would let the smugglers handle it from there.
So now you've got a
bunch of dodgy characters selling drugs in the Middle Kingdom basically backed
by the largest corporation and
the largest national economy in the world
and as Indian opium turned out to
be even stronger than the domestically grown stuff
everybody wanted it.
So opium sales skyrocketed
and by 1835 they were moving
roughly three million sixty-four thousand pounds of opium per year into China. And that
number was only going to get bigger because in 1833 the British government
decided to finally do away with the Honorable East India Company's monopoly
on the opium trade.
Now everybody wanted a piece of the action and opium started flowing into
China completely unregulated, increasing supply driving prices down and making
the substance even more accessible.
By 1839 nearly five million six hundred
thirty-nine thousand pounds of opium would be pouring into China every year.
But I'm getting ahead of myself because it's not like the Chinese were just
sitting around letting this happen.
As piles of money which the government
desperately needed flowed out of the country
the Emperor appointed an official named lin zexu to address the disastrous
effects of opium on the country
he was brilliant incorruptible and utterly inflexible.
He saw the threat of
the west and the morally corrupting effect that opium had had on the Chinese
people and decided that the only approach to take was the complete
removal of opium from china.
By march of 1839
he had reached canton,
it was the source of all this opium
so he planned to cut it off at its source.
His actions were Swift and
uncompromising,
he arrested thousands of Chinese opium traders. Forced addicts into
rehabilitation programs,
confiscated opium pipes and closed opium dens. And
then he took on the Western traders
at first he wrote an open letter to Queen
Victoria appealing to her conscience.
A letter which is very likely she never received.
When he got no reply
he demanded that the foreigners surrender their stores of opium. The
foreign merchants stalled and prevaricated giving up small amounts of
their opium stock but nowhere near what lin zexu had demanded. So he marshaled
the troops and put the foreign warehouses to siege. The merchants holed
up for a month and a half
but in the end they gave in and were forced to surrender 21,000 chests of opium.
For the next 23 days
Zexu burned the opium with lye,
this was a king's ransom in opium the amount
of money this destruction represented is staggering.
It was roughly one
sixth as much as the British Empire the largest most far-flung Empire in the
world had spent on its military the previous year.
Needless to say everybody involved was going bankrupt.
Now there is some debate over whether the Chinese offered tea in exchange for
the surrendered opium but what is certain is that the merchants never
received any tea and instead the local chief superintendent of British trade
one captain Charles Elliott
promised the merchants that the British government
would cover their losses if they would leave peacefully.
Which of course the British government absolutely refused to do.
The outcry over
this illegal seizure of British goods began to grow.
Meanwhile back in China a reprehensible incident occurred where some drunken
British sailors beat a man to death.
Lin zexu demanded the execution of a British sailor in recompense,
captain Elliott who actually disliked the opium trade and was somewhat
sympathetic to the Chinese situation put out a reward for evidence of who had
committed the murder and gave money to the victim's family.
He then had the criminals tried on his ship inviting Lin zexu or a
representative to witness the proceedings
although none took him up on the invitation.
He sentenced the men to hard
labor back in England
but this wouldn't work for lin zexu
after all the whole point of his demand was to show that foreigners couldn't
just violate Chinese law on Chinese soil.
So in response he stopped all food being
supplied to the British and posted signs telling them that frothier water sources
had been poisoned.
Next he ordered the Portuguese to reject all British from Macau
he was going to see these pesky British and their drugs off Chinese soil once
and for all.
So the British retreated to a barren nothing island off the coast a barren
nothing island that will eventually be known as Hong Kong.
Their food crisis was
at a head though
captain Elliott sent a request for food sales to resume. The response was delayed,
so he sent men ashore to buy food
but as they were heading back these provisions were seized by Chinese officials.
Soon a firefight broke out between the blockading Chinese junks and
the British ships
and thus began the first opium war